Before we bought our house, I had always wanted to have a dog named Zero. At the time, my wife and I were studying Japanese for a trip we planned to take to visit a friend who was studying abroad in Tokyo (here are a few pictures from that trip). I made an offhand joke once to my wife that if I did ever get a dog named Zero, I'd have to also have one named Ichi (the number one in Japanese) so that I could have binary dogs.

Well, the day we bought our house my wife and parents surprised me with two Shiba puppies. It was a total shock and I couldn't have been more happy.

Though they love to get in the trash and tear things up (you should have seen our baseboards on our beautiful new house...), they've been great dogs for our family. We even had an album we posted about them go semi viral when we had our daughter. Just stay away from the comments if you go searching... They're exactly what you'd expect.